The sixtieth anniversary of the "end" of the Korean war saw President
Obama attempt to rescue that classic example of interventionist failure from
history’s dustbin. Addressing
veterans of that conflict, he declared:

“That war was no tie. Korea was a victory. When 50 million South Koreans
live in freedom, a vibrant democracy…a stark contrast to the repression and
poverty of the North, that is a victory and that is your legacy.”

This is a fairytale: it wasn’t a victory, or even a tie: the US public was
disenchanted with the war long before the armistice, and Truman was under considerable
pressure at home to conclude an increasingly unpopular conflict. As for this
guff about "democracy": whatever the US was fighting for, from 1950,
when the war broke out, to 1953, when it ground to a halt, democracy hardly
described the American cause.

We were fighting on behalf of Syngman Rhee, the US-educated-and-sponsored dictator
of South Korea, whose vibrancy was demonstrated by the large-scale slaughter of his leftist political opponents. For 22 years, Rhee’s word was law, and many
thousands of his political opponents were murdered: tens of thousands were jailed
or driven into exile. Whatever measure of liberality has reigned on the Korean
peninsula was in spite of Washington’s efforts and ongoing military presence.
When the country finally rebelled against Rhee, and threw him out in the so-called
April Revolution of 1960, he was ferried to safety in a CIA helicopter as crowds
converged on the presidential palace.

The mythology that has coagulated around the Korean war is epitomized by Obama’s
recent peroration, a compendium of uplifting phrases largely bereft of any real
history. When history intrudes, it is seen only in very soft focus. The phrase
"Korea reminds us" recurs throughout, like the refrain of a pop song,
but nowhere does this anonymous presidential speechwriter remind us of the origins
of this war. How did it come about?

The standard neocon-cold war liberal line is that the North Koreans, in league
with Moscow and Beijing, launched a war of aggression on June 25, 1950, when
North Korean troops poured across the disputed border. What this truncated history leaves
out is that, in doing so, they preempted Rhee’s own plans to launch an invasion
northward. As historian Mark E. Caprio, professor of history at Rikkyo University
in Tokyo, points
out:

"On February 8, 1949, the South Korean president met with Ambassador
John Muccio and Secretary of the Army Kenneth C. Royall in Seoul. Here the Korean
president listed the following as justifications for initiating a war with the
North: the South Korean military could easily be increased by 100,000 if it
drew from the 150,000 to 200,000 Koreans who had recently fought with the Japanese
or the Nationalist Chinese. Moreover, the morale of the South Korean military
was greater than that of the North Koreans. If war broke out he expected mass
defections from the enemy. Finally, the United Nations’ recognition of South
Korea legitimized its rule over the entire peninsula (as stipulated in its constitution).
Thus, he concluded, there was "nothing [to be] gained by waiting."

The only reason Rhee didn’t launch an attack was due to American reluctance
to supply him with the arms and aid he would need: war, when it came, would
be on America’s terms, and our leaders had good reason to think it would come
sooner rather than later. Washington’s policy was to keep Rhee supplied with
just enough arms to control the South. There is also evidence for Congressman
Howard Buffett’s contention that the secret testimony
before Congress of CIA director Admiral Hillenkoeter proved US responsibility
for the war.

Buffett, Republican anti-interventionist from Nebraska, went to his grave demanding
the declassification of that crucial testimony: alas, to no avail. And yet what
we do know is this: the US government had ample warnings of the pending North
Korean invasion, via intelligence reports sent to top cabinet officials well
before the June 25 commencement of large-scale hostilities. Yet Washington took
no action, either diplomatic or otherwise, to deter the North Koreans.

On the other side of the equation, the Communist world was divided on the Korea
question, with Stalin skeptical of Kim il Sung’s assurances that his forces
would achieve victory in three days. Russian policy was: military aid, yes –
Soviet intervention, no. China’s Mao, on the other hand, offered his support
– which wasn’t actually forthcoming, however, until the US entered the war and
advanced into North Korea itself.

Neither Stalin nor President Harry Truman were particularly eager to see the
conflict erupt, although both may have considered it inevitable. In which case
it was convenient, for propaganda purposes, to be able to portray the enemy
as having fired the first shot.

As to who did in reality fire that shot, Bruce Cumings, head of the history
department at the University of Chicago, gave us the definitive answer in his
two-volume The Origins
of the Korean War, and The
Korean War: A History: the Korean war started during the American occupation
of the South, and it was Rhee, with help from his American sponsors, who initiated
a series of attacks that well preceded the North Korean offensive of 1950. From
1945-1948, American forces aided Rhee in a killing spree that claimed tens of
thousands of victims: the counterinsurgency campaign took a high toll in Kwangju,
and on the island of Cheju-do – where as many as 60,000 people were murdered
by Rhee’s US-backed forces.

Rhee’s army and national police were drawn from the ranks of those who had
collaborated with the Japanese occupation during World War II, and this was
the biggest factor that made civil war inevitable. That the US backed these
quislings guaranteed widespread support for the Communist forces led by Kim
IL Sung, and provoked the rebellion in the South that was the prelude to open
North-South hostilities. Rhee, for his part, was eager to draw in the United
States, and the North Koreans, for their part, were just as eager to invoke
the principle of "proletarian internationalism" to draw in the Chinese
and the Russians.

Having backed the Maoists during World War II, in cooperation with the Soviet
Union, the US had already "lost" China, and Truman was determined
not to "lose" Korea, too. In spite of the fact that he had ample warning
of the North Korean offensive, the President used this "surprise attack"
to justify sending American troops to Korea to keep Rhee in power, and in doing
so neglected to go to Congress for approval – or even give them advance notice.

Republicans were outraged: Sen. Robert A. Taft and others denounced this usurpation
of Congress’s constitutional duty as a dangerous precedent that would come back
to haunt us – as it surely did in Vietnam, and continues to do so to this day.
In the months prior to the war, anti-interventionist Republicans in Congress
had succeeded in defeating the administration’s $60 million aid package to the
Rhee regime (by one vote!), but this was later reversed on account of pressure
from the well-funded China Lobby. Now Truman had sent our troops to fight in
a foreign war as if he were a Roman emperor ordering his legionnaires into Gaul.

In defense of the administration, the liberals came out in support of the war,
with The Nation and The New Republicleading the charge: the antiwar
Republicans were "isolationists" and their alliance with "legalists,"
sniffed TNR, revealed a natural affinity, while progressives were burdened with
no such sentimental attachments to the Constitution. The editor of The Nation
red-baited Col. Robert McCormick‘s fiercely conservative Chicago Tribune
for being on the same side as the American Communist Party. What’s interesting
is that the CP’s former fellow-travelers, such as Henry Wallace, Corliss Lamont,
and the principals of the Progressive Party – which had run Wallace for President
with fulsome Communist support – rallied behind Truman, reveling in the idea
of a UN-sponsored war on behalf of "collective security." Obama, it
seems, commands a similar ability to inspire the left to throw its vaunted antiwar
credentials overboard.

Sixty years after the non-ending of the Korean war – there is, to this day,
no peace treaty – the lesson of that conflict is not, as Obama insisted in his
speech, that "the drawdown after the end of World War II left us unprepared,"
but that involvement in other peoples’ civil wars is never to our benefit, or
theirs. Sixty years have passed, and US troops are still in South Korea, defending
a country well-prepared to take care of itself – sitting ducks if the North
Koreans should ever launch an attack. Having stifled every effort at peaceful
reunification – including a promising effort during the Bush era – Washington
continues to enable the Korean standoff, and in doing so perpetuates the North
Korean regime, one of the worst, if not the worst, in the world.

North Korea is dangerously unstable, with a significant movement within the
military against the rule of Kim Jong-un, the third member of the IL Sungist
dynasty to take the reins of power. There have been episodic reports of gun
battles between rival military units, and this, combined with North Korea’s
dire economic straits, has the potential to spark an explosion sooner or later
– and inevitably draw in the South. Having isolated the North Koreans, who have
in turn isolated themselves, the West has limited its ability to have much of
an effect on the ground.

The two Koreas are very different, opposites in many ways, but one thing unites
them: an intense nationalism. This same nationalism resents the US presence,
whatever the pretext, and will one day find expression in a successful national
reunification. Until that day, the unfinished war and its consequences will
continue to be a thorn in our side.

NOTES IN THE MARGIN

You can check out my Twitter feed by going here.
But please note that my tweets are sometimes deliberately provocative, often
made in jest, and largely consist of me thinking out loud.

201231383524 Responseshttp%3A%2F%2Foriginal.antiwar.com%2Fjustin%2F2013%2F07%2F28%2Fwho-really-started-the-korean-war%2FWho+Really+Started+the+Korean+War%3F2013-07-29+06%3A00%3A33Justin+Raimondohttp%3A%2F%2Foriginal.antiwar.com%2F%3Fp%3D2012313835 to “Who Really Started the Korean War?”

a nice history lesson and i definitely learned a few things. i have and always despised harry truman as a bespectacled little bureaucrat who preceded the globalists with his unwavering support of illegal intervention. his name should go down as one of the most epic defilers of the constitution. his precedent has gone (engaging in war without congressional approval) about as far as anything in destroying our republic.

There is much more to be said on this topic.
One classic is I.F. Stone's "The hidden History of the Korean War," which reveals how the US with the Dulles brothers in the lead getting the war started.
Second, it was the US's first undeclared war, the harbinger of others like Obama's war on Libya.
Third, it was a Republican Eisenhower who ran on a peace platform and ended the war, a peace candidate in deed as opposed to one like Obama steeped in lies. Ike's big mistake was to allow the Dulles brothers to be his advisors.
Fourth, the Chinese Kuomintang lobby based in Taiwan (Formosa then) exerted the same influence over US foreign policy in the Far East as Israel does in the Middle East, albeit to a lesser extent.
Fifth, the US was able to get UN cover when the USSR walked out of the Security Council in protest whereupon a vote was taken to send troops to Korea.
Sixth, although the US was allied with China including Mao to defeat the Japanese, it supported the forces of Chang Kai-Shek from 1946 to 1949 to stop the liberation of China from Western dominance by Mao.
Seventh, Mao warned the US not to cross the 38th parallel or China would enter the war. The US did and China did. Mao feared from 1949 that the West, mainly the US, would use the two peninsulas, the Korean and the Indochinese, to advance on China. He was right.
Eighth, there was a plan drawn up to nuke China and Russia down to the targets and number of bombs. Thankfully it was ever implemented, because I suspect the Russians already had nuclear weapons.
Ninth, the US bombed the North relentlessly, reducing it to rubble. "Submit or be destroyed" has always been the unstated motto of the US Empire. One to two million Asians died in that war, and 50,000 Americans, much like in Vietnam.
Tenth, the war was better covered with actual scenes of the brutal fighting appearing on US TV news, limited to 15 minutes in those days. By comparison today's imperial wars in Iraq, AfPak and Libya are sanitized with NPR daily presenting some puff piece on the humanity of the US troops. We have sunk ever lower. Recordings, however, exist but we have only seen one, entitled "Collateral Murder."

And let's not forget that Harry Truman gave us the Cold War. Which was a hoax on the same level as the 9/11 hoax and current War On Terror. When you read American history, it quickly becomes obvious that since the Federal Reserve Banking cartel took over in 1913, the US has been on a continuous war footing ever since. And apparently unable to function and successfully compete with the rest of the world without resorting to wars of conquest disguised as humanitarian interventions. The bottom line is that absent continual wars to feed the nation's wealth through the Pentagon and into the defense industry the US economy would survive for only a very short time.

there wasn't much for Mao until early 1945 when the OSS showed up and the european war ended, as their was a ton more stuff for everybody The army and navy operations were aligned with the KMT, this was actually good for him as it suggested to Chinese that they weren't in the pocket of some foriegn power.

Justin, I am amazed that after so well documenting the monstrosities committed by the American sponsered Rhee, that you should so comfortably call the North Korean regime the worst in the world. And what do you offer in evidence, the famine ravaging the land due mostly to bad weather and the insidious destruction of ALL INFRASTUCTURE, and I mean ALL, in the North by a massive relentles carpet bombing with the powerful B29s. Apart from all electricity, roads and bridges being destroyed, every agricultural reservoir and irrigation canal were wipe off the map!

The article you reference has this typical passage which is the hallmark of crass propaganda suited for the mentally challenged American Public:

“In my village in May, a man who killed his own two children and tried to eat them was executed by a firing squad,” an unnamed citizen journalist told Asia Press.

This is definite scientific proof that the North Korean regime is "the worst in the world"??

The US attacks by, air, sea and land, aiming at the southward invading army of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North), which nevertheless unifies the peninsula in five short weeks (except for the US defended port city of Pusan); with little resistance from South Korea’s ROK military as most of its soldiers either defect or go home; over the next three years US will commit dozens of high death toll documented atrocities (some recently apologized for) as American planes level to the ground almost every city and town of any appreciable size in the entire peninsula, north and south, in the end threatening to drop the atomic bomb, and be charged with germ warfare by some not easily dismissed sources.

It is hard to exaggerate how devastated the Korean peninsula was in 1953; Gen. Douglas MacArthur said he vomited after he looked "at that wreckage." Three years of conflict killed about 3 million people, most of them civilians. One-third of all homes and two-fifths of all factories were destroyed. Seoul, Pyongyang and all other cities were little more than rubble. Food was scarce, orphans plentiful.

The US may have killed 20% of the population of Korea, said General Curtis Lemay, who was involved in the US air war on Korea. If so, that is a higher rate of genocidal slaughter than what the Nazis inflicted on Poland or the Soviet Union. The Korean War may be unknown ancient history to us, but it is no more ancient history to Koreans than the Nakba is to Palestinians.

That " if not the worse in the world regime" has proudly conducted North Korea, albeit with chinese support, to stand independent of imperialism and that is not easy task for a small country nowadays. I could grade it between the best in the world regimes.

Even if the Communists had possessed no nuclear weapons to retaliate with, the amount of nuclear bombs necessary to neutralize Russia and China as effective combatants would have not only sent huge clouds of radioactive fallout all the way around the world, but the dust itself and the ashes caused by the massive fires the bombs would ignite would have produced "nuclear winter".

However, no one knew about "nuclear winter" in the 1950s, so that would not have deterred our warmongers.

Maybe the only thing deterring them was the belief, accurate or not, that the USSR had nukes also.

If that be so, then the Rosenbergs, and everyone else responsible for getting the Soviets nukes by the Korean War, SAVED THE WORLD.

The American-sponsered Rhee may deserve blame for the destruction of infrastructure in North Korea, but it does not deserve by itself blame for the failure of North Korea to rebuild that infrastructure, especially given the relative economic prosperity to the south. The fact that North Korea is a communist dictatorship probably has something to do with it. Communist dictatorships don't exactly have the greatest record with regard to economic prosperity.

[…] Who Really Started the Korean War? by Justin Raimondo, http://original.antiwar.com/ The sixtieth anniversary of the “end” of the Korean war saw President Obama attempt to rescue that classic example of interventionist failure from history’s dustbin. Addressing veterans of that conflict, he declared: – “That war was no tie. Korea was a victory. When 50 million South Koreans live in freedom, a vibrant democracy…a stark contrast to the repression and poverty of the North, that is a victory and that is your legacy.” – This is a fairytale: it wasn’t a victory, or even a tie: the US public was disenchanted with the war long before the armistice, and Truman was under considerable pressure at home to conclude an increasingly unpopular conflict. As for this guff about “democracy”: whatever the US was fighting for, from 1950, when the war broke out, to 1953, when it ground to a halt, democracy hardly described the American cause. – We were fighting on behalf of Syngman Rhee, the US-educated-and-sponsored dictator of South Korea, whose vibrancy was demonstrated by the large-scale slaughter of his leftist political opponents. For 22 years, Rhee’s word was law, and many thousands of his political opponents were murdered: tens of thousands were jailed or driven into exile. Whatever measure of liberality has reigned on the Korean peninsula was in spite of Washington’s efforts and ongoing military presence. When the country finally rebelled against Rhee, and threw him out in the so-called April Revolution of 1960, he was ferried to safety in a CIA helicopter as crowds converged on the presidential palace. – The mythology that has coagulated around the Korean war is epitomized by Obama’s recent peroration, a compendium of uplifting phrases largely bereft of any real history. When history intrudes, it is seen only in very soft focus. The phrase “Korea reminds us” recurs throughout, like the refrain of a pop song, but nowhere does this anonymous presidential speechwriter remind us of the origins of this war. How did it come about? – The standard neocon-cold war liberal line is that the North Koreans, in league with Moscow and Beijing, launched a war of aggression on June 25, 1950, when North Korean troops poured across the disputed border. What this truncated history leaves out is that, in doing so, they preempted Rhee’s own plans to launch an invasion northward. As historian Mark E. Caprio, professor of history at Rikkyo University in Tokyo, points out: – “On February 8, 1949, the South Korean president met with Ambassador John Muccio and Secretary of the Army Kenneth C. Royall in Seoul. Here the Korean president listed the following as justifications for initiating a war with the North: the South Korean military could easily be increased by 100,000 if it drew from the 150,000 to 200,000 Koreans who had recently fought with the Japanese or the Nationalist Chinese. Moreover, the morale of the South Korean military was greater than that of the North Koreans. If war broke out he expected mass defections from the enemy. Finally, the United Nations’ recognition of South Korea legitimized its rule over the entire peninsula (as stipulated in its constitution). Thus, he concluded, there was “nothing [to be] gained by waiting.” – The only reason Rhee didn’t launch an attack was due to American reluctance to supply him with the arms and aid he would need: war, when it came, would be on America’s terms, and our leaders had good reason to think it would come sooner rather than later. Washington’s policy was to keep Rhee supplied with just enough arms to control the South. There is also evidence for Congressman Howard Buffett’s contention that the secret testimony before Congress of CIA director Admiral Hillenkoeter proved US responsibility for the war. – Buffett, Republican anti-interventionist from Nebraska, went to his grave demanding the declassification of that crucial testimony: alas, to no avail. And yet what we do know is this: the US government had ample warnings of the pending North Korean invasion, via intelligence reports sent to top cabinet officials well before the June 25 commencement of large-scale hostilities. Yet Washington took no action, either diplomatic or otherwise, to deter the North Koreans. – On the other side of the equation, the Communist world was divided on the Korea question, with Stalin skeptical of Kim il Sung’s assurances that his forces would achieve victory in three days. Russian policy was: military aid, yes – Soviet intervention, no. China’s Mao, on the other hand, offered his support – which wasn’t actually forthcoming, however, until the US entered the war and advanced into North Korea itself. – Neither Stalin nor President Harry Truman were particularly eager to see the conflict erupt, although both may have considered it inevitable. In which case it was convenient, for propaganda purposes, to be able to portray the enemy as having fired the first shot. – As to who did in reality fire that shot, Bruce Cumings, head of the history department at the University of Chicago, gave us the definitive answer in his two-volume The Origins of the Korean War, and The Korean War: A History: the Korean war started during the American occupation of the South, and it was Rhee, with help from his American sponsors, who initiated a series of attacks that well preceded the North Korean offensive of 1950. From 1945-1948, American forces aided Rhee in a killing spree that claimed tens of thousands of victims: the counterinsurgency campaign took a high toll in Kwangju, and on the island of Cheju-do – where as many as 60,000 people were murdered by Rhee’s US-backed forces. – Rhee’s army and national police were drawn from the ranks of those who had collaborated with the Japanese occupation during World War II, and this was the biggest factor that made civil war inevitable. That the US backed these quislings guaranteed widespread support for the Communist forces led by Kim IL Sung, and provoked the rebellion in the South that was the prelude to open North-South hostilities. Rhee, for his part, was eager to draw in the United States, and the North Koreans, for their part, were just as eager to invoke the principle of “proletarian internationalism” to draw in the Chinese and the Russians. – Having backed the Maoists during World War II, in cooperation with the Soviet Union, the US had already “lost” China, and Truman was determined not to “lose” Korea, too. In spite of the fact that he had ample warning of the North Korean offensive, the President used this “surprise attack” to justify sending American troops to Korea to keep Rhee in power, and in doing so neglected to go to Congress for approval – or even give them advance notice. – read more! […]

[…] Who Really Started the Korean War? (AntiWar.com) “The sixtieth anniversary of the “end” of the Korean war saw President Obama attempt to rescue that classic example of interventionist failure from history’s dustbin. Addressing veterans of that conflict, he declared: “That war was no tie. Korea was a victory. When 50 million South Koreans live in freedom, a vibrant democracy…a stark contrast to the repression and poverty of the North, that is a victory and that is your legacy.” This is a fairytale: it wasn’t a victory, or even a tie.” […]

[…] We now know that great doubt surrounded the meaning of the North Korean attack and its motivation. We now know that there was no monolithic international Communist movement, and that this imagined entity was not on any march to conquer independent nations of which South Korea was the first. There was no “very real danger” to America’s national security or other free nations far from Korea. […]

Justin Raimondo is the editorial director of Antiwar.com, and a senior fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute. He is a contributing editor at The American Conservative, and writes a monthly column for Chronicles. He is the author of Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement [Center for Libertarian Studies, 1993; Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2000], and An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard [Prometheus Books, 2000].